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I was going to suggest earlier that we actually rename the thread to 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, since ya know, the Russians are the only aggressors here and Ukraine is merely defending itself.
Every war is like that. Sino-Japanese War on 1937-45, Japan attacked an otherwise peaceful China.
 
Every war is like that. Sino-Japanese War on 1937-45, Japan attacked an otherwise peaceful China.
Usually the winner will try to rewrite history to show that they were attacked (even if they were actually preparing an attack but the other side struck first.) In the Ukraine case I think nobody (even Putin) thinks they were going to attack Russia or start persecuting Russian speakers (who Russia then had a "obligation" to save.)
 
Usually the winner will try to rewrite history to show that they were attacked (even if they were actually preparing an attack but the other side struck first.) In the Ukraine case I think nobody (even Putin) thinks they were going to attack Russia or start persecuting Russian speakers (who Russia then had a "obligation" to save.)

I find the whole thing rather arbitrary. It's not like there is a board or commission or a set of rules to name them. Sometimes, there is a relatively formal name that is overtaken by another name. I'm not sure the media, as we know it today, can be blamed since it has gone on for centuries. The naming is often also a matter of perspective. The USSR called the eastern front of WWII the Great Patriotic War.

- The Winter War (1939-40, Soviet vs Finland). AKA the First Soviet-Finnish War. Of interest, another Russian ware against a much smaller adversary that didn't go as planned.
- The War of 1812 (UK vs US, 1812-1815). I've never heard another name for it although some historians view it as part of a series of conflicts over North America some call the Sixty Year War.
- The Peninsular War (1808-14, UK, Spain, Portugal vs France). Part of Napoleonic Wars.
 
I find the whole thing rather arbitrary. It's not like there is a board or commission or a set of rules to name them. Sometimes, there is a relatively formal name that is overtaken by another name. I'm not sure the media, as we know it today, can be blamed since it has gone on for centuries. The naming is often also a matter of perspective. The USSR called the eastern front of WWII the Great Patriotic War.

- The Winter War (1939-40, Soviet vs Finland). AKA the First Soviet-Finnish War. Of interest, another Russian ware against a much smaller adversary that didn't go as planned.
- The War of 1812 (UK vs US, 1812-1815). I've never heard another name for it although some historians view it as part of a series of conflicts over North America some call the Sixty Year War.
- The Peninsular War (1808-14, UK, Spain, Portugal vs France). Part of Napoleonic Wars.

Going to the US and reading or hearing about something called “The French and Indian War” confused me until I realize that was referring to the Seven Years’ War.
 
Do you believe Russia on the following? I don't.

Russia says military action will stop immediately if Ukraine agrees to four conditions

From link.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov gave Moscow's most explicit statement so far of the terms it wants to impose on Ukraine to halt its "special military operation", which is now in its 12th day.
Pesko said Ukraine must:
  • Cease military action
  • Change its constitution to enshrine neutrality
  • Acknowledge Crimea as Russian territory
  • Recognise the separatist republics of Donetsk and Lugansk as independent territories.
9d97f120-9e22-11ec-beff-c482c585277e


By "neutrality", it would have to exclude Russia, Belarus, and their allies, as well as NATO.
 
Do you believe Russia on the following? I don't.

Russia says military action will stop immediately if Ukraine agrees to four conditions

From link.

Pesko said Ukraine must:
  • Cease military action
  • Change its constitution to enshrine neutrality
  • Acknowledge Crimea as Russian territory
  • Recognise the separatist republics of Donetsk and Lugansk as independent territories.
9d97f120-9e22-11ec-beff-c482c585277e


By "neutrality", it would have to exclude Russia, Belarus, and their allies, as well as NATO.

Putin has been consistent with those demands, so I'd say they're trustworthy (not that that means much when it comes to him), but the problem is that they are impossible for Ukraine to meet. I could maybe, maybe see the Ukrainian government agreeing to recognizing Crimea as Russian and the breakaway republics as "independent" since the ethnic population of all 3 is Russian by vast majority (and I don't think any of them desires to be part of Ukraine anyway), but they will never, ever agree to a state of neutrality that prevents admission to the EU and NATO. That's what they aspire to, and that is their right as a nation. They already formally applied to join the EU just last week. Perhaps a roundabout way could be to agree to official neutrality, then wait until Putin is gone (however long that takes) and hopefully is replaced by a far less aggressive Russian leader before attempting to join NATO, etc.
 

The Two Blunders That Caused the Ukraine War


Robert Service, a leading historian of Russia, says Moscow will win the war but will lose the peace and fail to subjugate Ukraine. How Putin could be deposed.​

From link.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine resulted from two immense strategic blunders, Robert Service says. The first came on Nov. 10, when the U.S. and Ukraine signed a Charter on Strategic Partnership, which asserted America’s support for Kyiv’s right to pursue membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The pact made it likelier than ever that Ukraine would eventually join NATO—an intolerable prospect for Vladimir Putin. “It was the last straw,” Mr. Service says. Preparations immediately began for Russia’s so-called special military operation in Ukraine.

Mr. Service, 74, is a veteran historian of Russia, a professor emeritus at St. Antony’s College, Oxford and a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He has written biographies of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky. The last work, published in 2009, attracted the ire of die-hard Trotskyites world-wide for saying that their hero shared many basic ideas with Lenin and Stalin on the “one-party, one ideology terror state.” Mr. Service says they still “mess around” his Wikipedia entry.

The November agreement added heft to looser assurances Ukraine received at a NATO summit five months earlier that membership would be open to the country if it met the alliance’s criteria. Mr. Service characterizes these moves as “shambolic mismanagement” by the West, which offered Ukraine encouragement on the NATO question but gave no apparent thought to how such a tectonic move away from Moscow would go down with Mr. Putin. “Nothing was done to prepare the Ukrainians for the kind of negative response that they would get.”

After all, Mr. Service says, Ukraine is “one of the hot spots in the mental universe of Vladimir Putin, and you don’t wander into it without a clear idea of what you’re going to do next.” The West has known that since at least 2007, when the Russian ruler made a speech at the Munich Conference on Security Policy that was, in Mr. Service’s words, “a rage against Ukraine ever joining NATO.” He was about to step down from the Russian presidency (to become prime minister for four years), “so it was his last lion’s roar in the jungle.” When he returned as president in 2012, he made it clear again that “the Ukraine-NATO question wasn’t negotiable.”
In July 2021 he wrote an essay that foretold the invasion. Mr. Service sums it up as saying, “more or less, that Ukrainians and Russians are one people.” Mr. Putin had said so many times before, “but not as angrily and punchily—and emotionally.”

It rankles Mr. Putin that Ukraine would seek to join the West—and not merely because he wants it as a satellite state. He also “can’t afford to allow life to a neighboring Slav state which has even a smidgen of democratic development. His Russian people might get dangerous ideas.”

As a result of the invasion, which began on Feb. 24, “the U.S. has started to get its act together,” Mr. Service says. “But I don’t think American diplomacy covered itself in glory in 2021.”
The second strategic error was Mr. Putin’s underestimation of his rivals. “He despises the West and what he sees as Western decadence,” Mr. Service says. “He had come to believe that the West was a shambles, both politically and culturally.” He also thought that the leaders of the West were “of poor quality, and inexperienced, in comparison with himself. After all, he’s been in power 20 years.”
In Mr. Putin’s cocksure reckoning, the invasion was going to be “a pushover—not just in regard to Ukraine, but in regard to the West.” He’d spent four years “running rings around Donald Trump,” and he thought the retirement of German Chancellor Angela Merkel left the West rudderless. That set the scene for the “surprise he got when he invaded Ukraine, when he found that he’d inadvertently united the West—that what he’d done was the very opposite of what he wanted.” Mr. Service calls Mr. Putin “reckless and mediocre” and scoffs at the notion that he is “some sort of genius.” What kind of Russian leader, he asks, “makes it impossible for a German leader not to build up Germany’s armaments”?
 

The Two Blunders That Caused the Ukraine War


Robert Service, a leading historian of Russia, says Moscow will win the war but will lose the peace and fail to subjugate Ukraine. How Putin could be deposed.​

From link.
We sort of overlook the detail of Putin's speeches, mad and rambling though they were. But he has consistently drawn link between Ukrainians and Russian - being one people. Also, that Ukraine is not a 'real' country and culturally and socially part of Russia.

Notwithstanding that the war is proving this empty bombastic, it makes explicit his interest in Ukraine and Ukraine only. The idea currently doing the rounds that he will plough onto the Baltic States and into central Europe is somewhat overheated rhetoric. We can make sketchy parallels with the 1930s (Hitler yes, but a lot of echoes in Stalin's landgrab in Finland, Baltics & Romania) but I think his eye is only on Ukraine, presumably for his legacy to Russia.
 
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We sort of overlook the detail of Putin's speeches, mad and rambling though they were. But he has consistently drawn link between Ukrainians and Russian - being one people. Also, that Ukraine is not a 'real' country and culturally and socially part of Russia.
He's killing, maiming, and displacing a shit ton of his "one people".
 
Do you believe Russia on the following? I don't.

Russia says military action will stop immediately if Ukraine agrees to four conditions

From link.

Pesko said Ukraine must:
  • Cease military action
  • Change its constitution to enshrine neutrality
  • Acknowledge Crimea as Russian territory
  • Recognise the separatist republics of Donetsk and Lugansk as independent territories.
9d97f120-9e22-11ec-beff-c482c585277e


By "neutrality", it would have to exclude Russia, Belarus, and their allies, as well as NATO.
Russia: Cease military action, change your constitution to enshrine neutrality
Ukraine: You first.
 
Putin has been consistent with those demands, so I'd say they're trustworthy (not that that means much when it comes to him), but the problem is that they are impossible for Ukraine to meet. I could maybe, maybe see the Ukrainian government agreeing to recognizing Crimea as Russian and the breakaway republics as "independent" since the ethnic population of all 3 is Russian by vast majority (and I don't think any of them desires to be part of Ukraine anyway), but they will never, ever agree to a state of neutrality that prevents admission to the EU and NATO. That's what they aspire to, and that is their right as a nation. They already formally applied to join the EU just last week. Perhaps a roundabout way could be to agree to official neutrality, then wait until Putin is gone (however long that takes) and hopefully is replaced by a far less aggressive Russian leader before attempting to join NATO, etc.
A couple points:

Firstly I think it is much more likely Ukraine would declare neutrality than give up Crimea, the DPR and the LPR. Ukraine knows they're nowhere close to joining NATO anyway, and if neutrality means security guarantees, why would you not agree to that at this point? Crimea, LPR and DPR are a matter of Ukrainian sovereignty however, I see no room to cave on that.

Secondly, I would not trust Putin's words at all. Ukraine was given security guarantees for denuclearization, look where that got them. Likewise, Russia decided, on their own accord, to tear up the Minsk agreement under completely false pretexts. What's to prevent them from doing that again. Additionally, Russia can't even adhere to humanitarian corridors and is bombing apartments, nuclear power plants, and assaulting hospitals. I would not for a minute trust this mans word, not to mention his clear desire for regime change, and his failure to acknowledge Ukraine as a country, nothing stops him from slowly chipping away again and again.

We sort of overlook the detail of Putin's speeches, mad and rambling though they were. But he has consistently drawn link between Ukrainians and Russian - being one people. Also, that Ukraine is not a 'real' country and culturally and socially part of Russia.

Notwithstanding that the war is proving this empty bombastic, it makes explicit his interest in Ukraine and Ukraine only. The idea currently doing the rounds that he will plough onto the Baltic States and into central Europe is somewhat overheated rhetoric. We can make sketchy parallels with the 1930s (Hitler yes, but a lot of echoes in Stalin's landgrab in Finland, Baltics & Romania) but I think his eye is only on Ukraine, presumably for his legacy to Russia.
Disagree. This goes back to 2007 where Putin basically put NATO on watch. Since then he's invaded Georgia, the Crimean Peninsula, and also turned Belarus into a Russian vassal state while also propping up the DPR, LPR and Kazakhstan (which he also recently declared didn't deserve statehood very similar to Ukraine)

He's also publicly stated he wants NATO to roll the clock back to 1997, this was literally one of his demands in negotiations with the West leading up to the invasion. This, among other things, means no baltics or Poland in NATO. Additionally he's talked about how the fall of the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire are among the world's greatest tragedies. So to suggest his conquest ends at Ukraine is folly in my opinion.

Just look to his recent summit with Xi and Putin, where they outlined their partnership for what they called a "new era" and their desire to create a more democratic globe, respect for human rights etc. China and Russia have incredible ambition, and want to topple western hegemony. At the very least if Putin is going down, there's no reason for him to not try and drag the West down with him.
 

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